The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is one of the USA’s largest privately funded grantmaking agencies. The Foundation explains its objectives:

One organization that started with MacArthur funding is the World Resources Institute, a non-profit that works to promote a sustainable world. According to Charity Navigator, WRI enjoys the maximum score of 100 for accountability and financial management.

One of the many WRI reports is Not Just Carbon — Capturing All the Benefits of Forests for Stabilizing the Climate.

▪ Forests have significant—and overwhelmingly positive—effects on climate stability through biophysical processes that affect transfers of energy and moisture in the atmosphere, contributing to food and water security, protecting human health, and enhancing our ability to adapt to a warming planet.

▪ Accounting for these processes can significantly affect estimates of the impacts of deforestation on the global climate based on their interaction with the carbon cycle alone, rendering the global cooling effect of avoiding tropical deforestation as much as 50 percent greater.

▪ Removal of forest cover, especially in the tropics, increases local temperatures and disrupts rainfall patterns in ways that compound the local effects of global climate change, threatening severe consequences for human health and agricultural productivity.

▪ By failing to take these biophysical effects into account, current policies systematically undervalue forests’ climate services, fail to anticipate the full range of climate risks associated with deforestation, and result in inequitable allocation of responsibilities and resources within and between nations.

▪ Policymakers should urgently recognize and address the full range of forests’ climate regulation services through institutions operating at relevant scales, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), institutions for regional cooperation, and domestic agencies charged with promoting agricultural productivity and protecting public health.

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David Eby’s NDP government spends huge sums each year to convince citizens that BC is acting against climate change. To that end, it promises to protect forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The province boasts that it has the strongest climate plan in Canada. However, while supposedly guiding BC to a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050, new energy minister Adrian Dix is tasked with growing the fossil fuel industry.

Of course, the province can unleash a squad of public relations staff and announce BC is on track to meet all of its climate targets. Like other provinces, BC has no independent method for accountability. Claims made about greenhouse gas reductions, clean energy, and forest protection are not fully supported by trustworthy science.

Writing for The Narwhal in 2024, Shannon Waters examined the gap between what the government promised to do and what the government has done to protect old-growth forests.

In their strategic review, Garry Merkel and Al Gorley said the government should manage B.C.’s old forests as ecosystems rather than a source of timber. They also called for an immediate deferral of logging in old-growth forests in B.C. at risk of irreversible biodiversity loss.

In an update before the 2024 election, BC claimed that 44 percent of old-growth timber has been preserved.

Ecologists disagreed with the government’s figures, saying less than three per cent of high productivity old-growth forests — the forests with the biggest trees and the richest biodiversity — were still standing. 

…The Wilderness Committee, an environmental non-profit group, called the update a stall tactic that “delays meaningful changes and fails to include any new interim measures to protect the most endangered old-growth forests.”

“The endless delays from the BC NDP are resulting in the destruction of irreplaceable forests they vowed to protect,” Tobyn Neame, the Wilderness Committee’s forest campaigner, said in a press release. “Premier David Eby promised accelerated action on old growth, not an